note
FoxtrotUniform
<p>One off-the-cuff idea: treat this as an image-processing
problem.</p>
<ol>
<li>Segment your world into a grid of "pixels", with
the intensity of each pixel being the number of problems
reported there.</li>
<li>Blur the "image" a bit, to group complaints that are
relatively close, but not in adjacent pixels. How much
you blur is probably a matter of experimentation.</li>
<li>Run an [google://edge detection] algorithm over the
image. You now have borders defining clumps of
complaints.</li>
</ol>
<p>The major problem that I can see is that you might get
several closely-spaced groups blurring into each other,
creating a single super-large group.</p>
<p><b>Update:</b> "Segment the world, find local maxima,
then calculate the [google://voronoi diagram] of the point
set described by the maxima" might work, too.</p>
<p><tt>-- <br>
The hell with [paco], vote for [Erudil]!<br>
:wq</tt></p>
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